August 30, 2007

Should women embrace the gray? That quote is from Anne Kreamer who wrote a whole book on the subject. Who reads such things? Oh, I think we know. And we know why they are published -- they are publicity magnets -- I say as I am magnetized into providing publicity.

“It feels deeply liberating to be off the treadmill of ‘Oh God, I have to get my roots done again,’” said Ms. Kreamer...

Women's liberation -- the physical, superficial kind. It's so 1970s.

[G]ray-haired celebrities [are few]. Those public figures with salt or peppered heads — George Clooney, Toni Morrison, Ms. Mirren, Anderson Cooper — tend to be preternaturally handsome people who play up their hair as a trademark feature....

In her book, Ms. Kreamer sets out to prove that an attractive noncelebrity can also remain alluring as she lets her ersatz brunette fade to gray.

The epiphany came when Ms. Kreamer, then 49, saw a photo of herself beside her teenage daughter and a gray-haired friend. She decided that they looked “real” while her dyed hair looked fraudulent.

Real? How far down that road are we going to travel?

“In one second, all my years of careful artifice, attempting to preserve what I thought of as a youthful look, were ripped away,” she writes. “All I saw was a kind of confused, schlubby middle-aged woman with hair dyed much too harshly.”

Get a better colorist! That's like becoming a nudist because you realize you have crappy clothes.

By the way, in my case, it's not a question of gray but pure white. (I always laugh when my enemies include in their attacks the lie that I bleach my hair. If I were a Yale law student, I'd sue them!) But I do occasionally think it would be interesting to see what it's like to go about with utterly white hair. It would change everything, wouldn't it? It might be an interesting bloggable, vloggable stunt. I should assign a dollar amount to it and urge PayPal contributions. Let's see: $50,000. Oh, don't balk! Kreamer is getting more than that for her scribblings.

As a guy, I didn't have the problem with accepting the inner gray. But because I still have a lot of hair, apparently, according to at least some women, a lot of gray supposedly looks good on me.

Nevertheless, it does bother me that almost all of the women of our generation have refused to go gray. Maybe it is that the Boomer generation is refusing to accept that they are aging and nearing retirement. Instead, we see huge advertising for all sorts of cosmetic surgery, Botox, etcc.

The younger sister of a good friend of mine accepted her inner gray, and it turned her from being decent looking to stunning. Her hair is almost white, it is well cut in a modern cut, and just looks awesome.

I just wish more of the women of my generation would accept the reality of our aging.

And I'd say that gray hair, or even white, doesn't necessarily mean old. There are people who start getting gray in their 20's. If more people just let that be the association of gray with elderly people would lessen.

Ruth Anne, I'm quite sure I've never talked about shaving my head. My idea was to stop touching up the roots and let them grow over the summer, which would probably be about 2 1/2 inches. Then, I'd have it cut to that length -- a high-quality haircut -- and it would be suddenly pure white and quite short. (But not that short.) I think that would be a funny thing to do. And I'd mean for it to look good.

Is there a way to set up a dedicated PayPal button? But it doesn't seem fair to collect for such a high amount unless there is a way to make it contingent so that the money is only collected once the total pledges meet the goal. Then there has to be a way to lock it in before I start to do it and pay me when I accomplish the end. It's a 4 month project.

I'm 44 and have had my hair colored once in my life. I will never do it again. All of my friends said they loved it, I thought I looked like a zebra. I was happy when it grew out.

Like everyone else, I don't think the issue is with coloring the hair per se, but with coloring it properly. A bad dye job is a bad dye job; a good one should be indistinguishable from natural hair.

I think the question over allowing ourselves to "go gray" is linked to our interior age. How old do you feel, mentally? I still feel like I'm in my 30s; there's not too much disconnect between my actual age and my interior age. But what about when I'm 60, will I still "feel" like I'm 33? Will I experience too much cognitive dissonance if I feel 33 and look into the mirror and see myself with a full head of gray hair? I think we'd all like to lock in our physical appearance so that it matches our internal perceptions of self; coloring hair is one way to do that.

At the risk of being run out of town, I prefer a woman who colors her hair over letting it go grey. Granted there is a time to let it go but the late 30s through the 50s seems too early to me. My wife has a great colorist though and that makes all the difference.

Still, if going grey makes you feel good then do it. If coloring makes you feel good do that.